“Not one woman in a thousand would have done it,” was the comment of Major Fairfax when he heard of the drive in the Park.  “Gad! most of ’em would have cut Carmen dead and put Jack in Coventry, and then there would have been the devil to pay.  It takes quality, though; she’s such a woman as Jack’s mother.  If there were not one of them now and then society would deliquesce.”  And the Major knew, for his principal experience had been with a deliquescent society.

Whether Carmen admired Mrs. Delancy or thought her weak it is impossible to say, but she understood the advances made and responded to them, for they fell in perfectly with her social plans.  She even had the face to eulogize Mrs. Delancy to Jack, her breadth of view, her lack of prejudice, and she had even dared to say, “My dear friend, she is too good for us,” and Jack had not protested, but with a laugh had accepted the implication of his position on a lower moral level.  Perhaps he did not see exactly what it meant, this being on confidential terms about his wife with another woman; all he cared for at the moment was that the comradeship of Miss Tavish and Carmen was agreeable to him.  They were no restraint upon him.  So long as they remained in town the exchange of civilities was kept up.  Carmen and Miss Tavish were often at his house, and there was something reassuring to Jack in the openness with which affairs went on.

Early in June Edith went down to their rented cottage on the south Long Island shore.  In her delicate health the doctor had recommended the seaside, and this locality as quiet and restful, and not too far from the whirl of the city.  The place had a charm of its own, the charm, namely, of a wide sky, illimitable, flashing, changing sea, rolling in from the far tropical South with its message of romance to the barren Northern shore, and the pure sand dunes, the product of the whippings of tempests and wild weather.  The cottage was in fact an old farmhouse, not an impertinent, gay, painted piece of architecture set on the sand like a tent for a month, but a solid, ugly, fascinating habitation, with barns and outhouses, and shrubs, and an old garden—­a place with a salty air friendly to delicate spring blossoms and summer fruits and foliage.  If it was a farmhouse, the sea was an important part of the farm, and the low-ceiled rooms suggested cabins; it required little imagination to fancy that an East-Indian ship had some time come ashore and settled in the sand, that it had been remodeled and roofed over, and its sides pierced with casement windows, over which roses had climbed in order to bind the wanderer to the soil.  It had been painted by the sun and the wind and the salt air, so that its color depended upon the day, and it was sometimes dull and almost black, or blue-black, under a lowering sky, and again a golden brown, especially at sunset, and Edith, feeling its character rather than its appearance to ordinary eyes, had named it the Golden House.  Nature is such a beautiful painter of wood.